The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

	Additional resources for this issue of History Now The Salem Witch Trials The Barbary Pirates William Walker Teapot Dome

Books and Print Resources:

You’ll certainly want to look at Professor Norton’s book-length study:

Norton, Mary Beth. In The Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2002.

And here are some other general studies of the trials. You’ll find a variety of explanations of the episode and approaches to the subject:

Hoffer, Peter Charles. The Devil's Disciples: Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Hoffer looks at social and cultural aspects of the world in which the witchcraft hysteria emerged.

_____. The Salem Witchcraft Trials: A Legal History. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Here Hoffer focuses more narrowly on way the colonial legal process was adapted for the trials.

Roach, Marilynne K. The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-To-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege. New York: Cooper Square, 2002. Presents events in a chronological format, relying on court records and other documents.

Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Not only retells the story of the trials but examines the way later Americans made use of the incident in fiction and non-fiction.

You have a choice of printed primary sources:

Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds. Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England. Boston: Northeastern University Press, c1993. Comprised mainly of background data on Salem Village (such as church records and local tax rolls), this is a one-volume version of the monumental four-volume edition that is now available on the Internet (see below) if you prefer online sources.

That four-volume edition has recently been superceded by a one-volume work (the new volume also corrects a number of errors in the previous one), published just this winter:

Rosenthal, Bernard, ed. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Hill, Frances. The Salem Witch Trials Reader. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, [2000]. This is a briefer, but still useful collection of documents and commentary.

For the community in which the first trials took place:

Gildrie, Richard P. Salem, Massachusetts, 1626-1683: A Covenant Community. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975.

Young, Christine Alice. From "Good Order" To Glorious Revolution: Salem, Massachusetts, 1628-1689. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, c1980.

These books study the lives of two central figures in the trials:

Francis, Richard. Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials And The Forming Of The American Conscience. New York: Fourth Estate, c2005. Paperback edition, New York: Harper, 2006. The only one of the trial judges to make a public apology for his rulings.

Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians And Puritan Fantasies. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

There are many editions of Arthur Miller’s famous play, The Crucible. You can easily find the DVD of the 1996 film version of the play, released on DVD in 2004. If your students want to study the play’s history – and cultural effect – more closely, this will be useful:

Johnson, Claudia D. and Vernon. Understanding The Crucible: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Internet Resources:

Without question, the definitive online source for materials on the trials is the University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities project, “Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project.” You’ll find a full text version of Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s edition of The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcriptions of the Court Records. 3 vols. Da Capo Press: New York, 1977. I should note, however, that a number of transcription errors in this edition (and in the online version) have been corrected in the newer Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, listed above.

The site also provides extensive background material on Danvers, Massachusetts, the modern name for Salem Village; original court records from Essex County and other jurisdictions; Salem record books; historical maps; manuscripts from various sources; biographical sketches; and texts of contemporary books:

http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/salem/17docs.html

This site offers links to a wealth of archival material on the Witchcraft Crisis:

http://www.17thc.us/primarysources/index.php

Here are other sites, less comprehensive but worth a look. National Geographic has a Website on Salem, done by Richard Trask:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/salem/

Just a reminder -- search Edsitement lesson plans for “Salem witch.” Take a close look, too, at University of Houston’s Digital History site -- good set of links on the trials and related topics related to its lesson plan on the subject for grades 9-12:

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/
lesson_plans_display.cfm?lessonID=23

About.com’s Women’s History Webpage on the trials has some useful links. Follow the one from the “Crucible Project,” for instance, to see a comprehensive guide to study materials on the Miller play:

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/salemlessonplans/
Salem_Witch_Trials_Lesson_Plans.htm

I was delighted to find a small group of well-done web-based sources for further study of the Wabanakis (also called the Abenakis by Europeans). Harold Prins’ “Storm Clouds over Wabanakiak Confederacy Diplomacy until Dummer's Treaty (1727)” is a very useful article on the Wabanakis in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries:

http://www.wabanaki.com/Harald_Prins.htm

For web-based materials on the group, look at this very useful guide prepared by Ne-Do-Ba, a nonprofit Maine corporation:

http://www.avcnet.org/ne-do-ba/web_hist.html#war

The Least Tern Website, maintained by John McIlvain and Elizabeth Sky-McIlvain offers a “Teaching Timeline” for classroom use:

http://www.leasttern.com/Wabanaki/Lessons/
Timelines/TeachingTimeline.html

And, from our friends at the Park Service, access to the downloadable text of a study on the Wakanakis, provided by the Acadia National Park Site:

http://www.nps.gov/acad/historyculture/ethnography.htm